Installing to Win 2003 server

Rails
1

I have to install InstantRails (1.4, the latest & greatest) on a virgin
Windows 2003 Server (32 bit version).

I know this thing comes with IIS on it, but I want to bypass that
altoghether and simply run Instant Rails.

Surely someone in the group has done this before as this particular
type of server is quite ubiquitous. Can anyone tell me what I must do
(aside from unzipping the InstantRails zip file!) to get this to work
on this server? Any way to put IIS to sleep for good on this thing? Any
pitfalls to watch out for on this configuration? Thanks in advance.

2

Ike wrote:

I have to install InstantRails (1.4, the latest & greatest) on a virgin
Windows 2003 Server (32 bit version).

I know this thing comes with IIS on it, but I want to bypass that
altoghether and simply run Instant Rails.

Surely someone in the group has done this before as this particular
type of server is quite ubiquitous. Can anyone tell me what I must do
(aside from unzipping the InstantRails zip file!) to get this to work
on this server? Any way to put IIS to sleep for good on this thing? Any
pitfalls to watch out for on this configuration? Thanks in advance.

Hi - I’ve done it for a small site & it works fine -
www.mbopdigital.com. This site runs edge rails with mongrel starting in
production mode on port 80. Admittedly its not a very complex site, but
its been running for about 4 months & has not missed a beat - the server
is also used by a designer as his main workstation.

Installation is incredibly easy:

  1. Install ruby
  2. Install ruby gems
  3. Install rails
  4. Upgrade to edge
  5. Install MySQL
  6. Create the rails site
  7. Start mongrel
  8. Add a scheduled task to start mongrel on startup.

You can turn IIS off or get it our of your way by:

  1. Turning off all IIS related service in control panel->services
  2. Removing it completely via Add/Remove programs->Windows Components
  3. Change the standard port from 80 to something else

I gather that The rails core don’t test rails on windows & don’t
officially support it. I use my windows laptop to develop a couple of
rails sites that run on slackware linux & almost everything seems to
work seamlessly [aside from action mailer].

My understanding is that you will start to get problems if your site
gets lots of hits [not a problem for me]. This is due to rails/mongrel
not being multi-threaded [-- anyone please tell me if I get this wrong
–]. So you will need to have a number of mongrel sessions running on
various ports, and a proxy or load balance sharing the user requests
between the mongrel sessions.

rgds,

  • matt.